Given a theory and observations,abduction tries to find explanations for observations.

Analyzing scientific discovery semantically,or researching the activities of scientific discovery themselves historically,we will find that,despite the social,historical,and psychological properties,scientific discovery is actually a logical process of generating,choosing,revising,receiving and interpreting new hypothesis,the logical mechanism is just abduction advocated by Charles S.

And the logic of language finds out that the premise in pragmatic inference is formed by abduction.

By comparing the non-demonstrative inference as discussed in Relevance Theory and abductive inference, this article applies the later Peircean logic of abduction and Hobbs Interpretation as Abduction to demonstrate that pragmatic reasoning is actually the specific application of abductive inference in utterance.

After introducing the basic features of abductive inference and its constraining principles in logic and computing science, we contrast abduction with pragmatic inference, with special reference to the pragmatic principles in Gricean theory and relevance theory.

Forward reasoning starts from the intention of the cooperating agent, which is used to create the initialized plan hypotheses; backward reasoning is based on abductive reasoning, which is used to find the most suitable plan of the cooperating agent from its actions.

Functions of analogical reasoning in the formulation of Coulomb law——A concurrent discussion about the limitations of analogical reasoning;

As one of central abilities in human cognitive development, analogical reasoning, which is different from deductive and inductive reasoning, has become an active field to study in current researching on human cognition.

Computing systems based on conventional architecture are very inefficient in doing analogical reasoning,which obstructs the research and application of analogical reasoning.